• ChiefCrazyTalk (unregistered) in reply to There but for the grace of God...

    The Real WTF (tm) is that it took a YEAR to fire her. It would be one thing if after her mistake was pointed out to her she laughed and said "my bad", but it was clear that she doesn't understand even the most basic concepts of programming, in any language. I would have fired her on the spot.

  • Jno (unregistered) in reply to Jaap-Jan
    Jaap-Jan:
    1337:
    ... Their our alot of common mistakes ...
    that was a joke write?
    Off course not.

    By the way, you spelt 'write' wrong, wright?

    By the way, you wrote wrong when you should have written wrongly.

    This could go on all day.

  • Jno (unregistered) in reply to Jaap-Jan
    Jaap-Jan:
    1337:
    ... Their our alot of common mistakes ...
    that was a joke write?
    Off course not.

    By the way, you spelt 'write' wrong, wright?

    By the way, you wrote wrong when you should have written wrongly.

    This could go on all day.

  • Rance Mohanitz (unregistered) in reply to RadiantMatrix

    It's misssteaks, not mistakes.

  • (cs) in reply to Ancient_Hacker
    Ancient_Hacker:
    I had the sentence:

    To exit the program, type "Quit", then press the Enter key.

    The editor person sent it back as:

    To exit the program, type "Quit," then press the Enter key.

    To exit the program, type Quit, then press the Enter key.

    I'd also have set it in a monospaced font, but the comment software doesn't allow it (why is it that we have completely different rules here than the real forums?)

    If you can't trust the users not to type the comma, can you really trust them not to type the quotes?

  • (cs) in reply to Hognoxious
    They just need to understand that it's not an equation, it's a command; there's an implied make or let before it.
    I've always imagined an implied prime sign after the variable name, too - one more for each time it's assigned. It's helpful for working things out on paper.
  • Rance Mohanitz (unregistered) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    Mike:
    ... Their our alot of common mistakes ...
    Hands up...who, like me, didn't even notice the mistake in this sentance until it was brought up in comments?
    By the mistake, do you mean using "could of" instead of "could have", or using "to" for "too"?
    Or, were you referring to Their (instead of there) or alot (instead of a lot)?
  • (cs) in reply to bambuti
    bambuti:
    DaveK:
    Spoe:
    There's a couple of others containing similar rules.

    There are a couple of others containing ....

    Nice try. Had it been

    "There's two others containing..."

    then you would be unarguably right. But "a couple of others" can function either as a plural noun (two others), or a singular noun (one couple (of others))...

    Strictly, it am a noun in the singular, and should never be accompanied by a verb in the plural. However, I note that the fine folk in Redmond ("In the beginning was Word" -- well, after just about everybody else, really) believe that "a couple" is always plural, and go all wavy and green if you attempt to make it singular. DaveK gets away with a bit of nit-picking here, I suppose.

    I wonder how Microsoft would parse "a set?" Does the conjugation depend upon the quantity of objects contained in the set?

  • Rance Mohanitz (unregistered) in reply to chris

    Here, here!

  • JohnB (unregistered) in reply to An honest mouse
    An honest mouse:
    She wouldn't had have this problem if only she was educated at Oxford.
    You mean "if she *were* educated at Oxford"...
    Only if you wanted to use the subjunctive. If you use the indicative then it would be quite correct. Use the subjunctive if you are referring to an impossibility ("If I were the President ... ") but use the indicative if it is possible ("If I was to take the train to New York the journey would take longer than if I was to take the plane.")

    Or something like that

  • Ada Lovelace (unregistered) in reply to Critic

    [quote user="Critic"][quote user="There but for the grace of God..."]

    Too bad making a better living doesn't make you a better person. [/quote]

    But then neither does making a worse living.

  • (cs)

    Sounds like somebody applying for a job as a magazine editor and ended up in the wrong office.....

  • Anonymous Pedant (unregistered) in reply to Anne
    Anne:
    Can I just say that all of the intentional grammar mistakes in the description and comments REALLY hurt my brain?

    That being said, I can still write syntactically correct C code. (Although sometimes if I've been writing a lot of Perl, I accidentally slip some perl into my C ("you got your Perl into my C! You got your C into my Perl! Hey...").) Maybe I started programming early enough so that my brain could handle the different syntaxes -- sort of like how kids who grow up bilingual are able to learn other languages much more easily.

    You think that's bad, I've been doing most of my work recently in a semi-functional language that does invocation and composition by juxtaposition (e.g. "f(x)" is just "f x" and "g(f(x))" is just "g f x"). Now I keep trying to do things like "file which foo" in the shell.

  • Gene (unregistered) in reply to Spoe

    "There's a couple of others containing similar rules."

    You mean "There're a couple of others containing similar rules."

  • bit (unregistered)

    Of course, the Real WTF here is English punctuation. Every sensible language encloses the phrase in quotes and lets the comma out of them.

  • (cs)

    Didn't all this "punctuation inside the quotes" nonsense arise due to technical issues with early printing presses?

  • (cs) in reply to NiceWTF
    NiceWTF:
    I have never understood this peculiarity of the english language.

    Quotation marks are used to, well, quote text. The comma itself does clearly not belong to the quoted text itself, but serves to separate it from the surrounding text.

    Thus, to me (as a programmer, obviously..sure) it seems completely illogical to place the comma within the quotes, ever.

    IMHO, it should be considered wrong in English for the same reason that it is wrong in most programming languages.

    Programmers are handicapped in arguing, because we have a need to make sense. English majors ain't gonna let a little thing like sense fuck up their argument.

  • Flim McBoobie (unregistered) in reply to Rance Mohanitz
    Rance Mohanitz:
    Here, here!

    Yes, hear hear here too. This whole story sucked. This WTF is a WTF unto itself.

    CAPTCHA = cognac - which I could use right now.

  • (cs) in reply to JohnB
    JohnB:
    An honest mouse:
    She wouldn't had have this problem if only she was educated at Oxford.
    You mean "if she *were* educated at Oxford"...
    Only if you wanted to use the subjunctive. If you use the indicative then it would be quite correct. Use the subjunctive if you are referring to an impossibility ("If I were the President ... ") but use the indicative if it is possible ("If I was to take the train to New York the journey would take longer than if I was to take the plane.")

    Or something like that

    No, that were to be the subjunctive.

    Sorry.

    No, that would be the subjunctive. And indeed is the subjunctive.

    "If I was to take the plane" is a hitherto unheard-of form of the preterite that indicates that you are possibly about to steal a jumbo jet. The subjunctive, over the five thousand years or so of development in PIE languages, indicates that you might or might not perform the action to which you refer.

    (I'm sure I'm wrong on Sanskrit here. Corrections humbly requested.)

    There are many ways to indicate the impossible. My current favourite is "It's impossible, of course, but ..."

    To indicate the unexpected, or the implausible, you might want to try on:

    "Were I to take the plane..."

    for size. This is, however, deep into Somerset Maugham territory, and we really don't want to go there at this late stage.

  • (cs) in reply to BrownHornet
    BrownHornet:
    Programmers are handicapped in arguing, because we have a need to make sense. English majors ain't gonna let a little thing like sense fuck up their argument.
    Make sense? You haven't been reading this site for very long, have you?

    Nice handicap to your argument, though. What, you argue off 24 or so? I'd stick to the nineteenth hole, were I you. Which, as a previous poster has (quite erroneously) pointed out, indicates an impossibility.

  • (cs) in reply to Hognoxious
    Hognoxious:
    real_aardvark:
    Not very likely. Most pure mathematicians past the age of, oh, around nine and a half can cope with discrete symbolic systems. They might bitch at the fact that this is not expressed as i <= i + 1, but they'll deal with it.
    I assume that's supposed to be an arrow. It's lucky you don't want to decrement the variable, because i <= i - 1 is pretty confusing too. How can i be less than or equal to one less than itself?

    They just need to understand that it,s not an equation, it's a command; there's an implied make or let before it.

    Thus, "discrete symbolic systems."

    I probably screwed up though. I was thinking in terms of an operator indicating "produces." Somehow (being tired) I managed "arrowish" notation rather than traditional BNF notation (or even, if you prefer, the Wirth variant). However, I believe my point stands. Give a pure (or even impure) mathematician a rigorously defined notation, and they won't have a problem. They're certainly not likely to look at i <= i + 1 and think "Ooh, look, a traditional boolean operator within C-related computer languages. That makes no sense at all, does it? My brain hurts!" given a context.

    Any more than they'd look at i = i + 1 and think "Bugger me. That doesn't work in C. I'll have to revise my entire notational system. Well, there goes solving that P-NP problem, then..."

  • (cs) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    bambuti:
    DaveK:
    Spoe:
    There's a couple of others containing similar rules.

    There are a couple of others containing ....

    Nice try. Had it been

    "There's two others containing..."

    then you would be unarguably right. But "a couple of others" can function either as a plural noun (two others), or a singular noun (one couple (of others))...

    Strictly, it am a noun in the singular, and should never be accompanied by a verb in the plural. However, I note that the fine folk in Redmond ("In the beginning was Word" -- well, after just about everybody else, really) believe that "a couple" is always plural, and go all wavy and green if you attempt to make it singular. DaveK gets away with a bit of nit-picking here, I suppose.

    I take it back. I'd rather be wrong than have MS agree with me!

  • (cs) in reply to BrownHornet
    BrownHornet:
    Programmers are handicapped in arguing, because we have a need to make sense.
    Actually, I have a need to make dollars. Contrary to the quote, I've found that if I take care of my dollars, the cents take care themselves.
  • Wandering Pedant (unregistered) in reply to Ancient_Hacker

    Ancient_Hacker: I don't suppose you could have persuaded the helpdesk to forward the resulting calls to the editor's desk?

    (hmm, my CAPTCHA is the same as it was for a previous comment.)

  • ur mom (unregistered)

    The real WTF is English. :-p I before E except after C. Just look at all the exceptions to that one.

  • kobal (unregistered) in reply to phaedrus
    phaedrus:
    An honest mouse:
    She wouldn't had have this problem if only she was educated at Oxford.
    You mean "if she *were* educated at Oxford"...

    I would only had have corrected this statement if I saw all the errors.

    Don't you mean "..if I seen da arrers"?

  • kobal (unregistered) in reply to Atario
    Atario:
    Harrow:
    send me the candidate who's comfortable punctuating the English sentence 
    I said 'Did he ask "Are you going?" or "Aren't you going?"?'.
    and I'll teach him what he needs to know about #@%*ing ASP.

    I do it that way all the time. Sometimes I even purposely reformulate a sentence to make it come out with nontraditional, but logical, punctuation like that.

    The correct answer is "yes" to these types of questions - for example, "Is the stove hot or cold?" or "are the dishes clean or dirty?" - that means that yes is the correct return value for a logical OR, right?

  • kobal (unregistered) in reply to PleegWat
    PleegWat:
    I think the use of assignment and functions by mathematicians predates programming. But what do I know, I'm just a math graduate...

    I call BS! A real math major would NEVER: A) think (they always KNOW) B) use self-deprecating humor to avoid seeming arrogant or
    pompous (it should be blindingly obvious to everyone how superior they are) C) avoid replying to a post like this (joke about mathematicians - how dare you!)

    captcha: smile - yes, you

  • Michele (unregistered) in reply to Michael

    Making a living shouldn't necessarily make you a better person, but I'd have hoped it would have made you a less ignorant one.

    Firstly, many people go to college for the pure, unadulterated love of knowledge. As far as making a living--despite my woebegone status as an English major, I'm third in my class and have promising prospects for a future in academia. Sidenote: I'm also one of the most tech-savvy chicks you'll find around. I don't by any means program (though I have a tremendous respect for CS), but I can often out-geek the geeks.

    Secondly, you do realize that at the college level, at any reputable college, students don't spend 8 hours a week learning grammar, right? In fact, I haven't heard a minute's lecture on it in my 3.5 years of college. English at the college level is about Literature and analysis and (in my case) creative writing. Grammar is something you'd damn well better know (or learn) by the time you set foot in the classroom. And if you find literary analysis to be "obvious" work, then by all means, please enlighten us all with your gift.

    I'm no trying to convert you to a OMG, Liberal Arts are amazing mindset; I'm just hoping you'll try a little better not to present yourself as an empty person whose meaning in life is to make a living--who can't conceive of a love of knowledge that compels people to go to school for reasons other than to be just another gear in the grinding machinery of capitalism.

  • (cs)

    The real real WTF(c) is, that she obvious isn't using an IDE with synthax highlighting...

  • bambuti (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    Strictly, it am a noun in the singular, and should never be accompanied by a verb in the plural. However, I note that the fine folk in Redmond ("In the beginning was Word" -- well, after just about everybody else, really) believe that "a couple" is always plural, and go all wavy and green if you attempt to make it singular. DaveK gets away with a bit of nit-picking here, I suppose.

    I believe that what you say wioll haven be entirely correct in American English, but in British English it's perfectly grammatical to use plural verbs with nouns that are semantically plural, even if they're syntactically singular. "England are beating France 14-9" and "Microsoft are all retards" are both fine over here.

    I wonder how Microsoft would parse "a set?" Does the conjugation depend upon the quantity of objects contained in the set?

    I admit that even in Britain, you have to strain a bit to come up with a plausible use of "this set are". But not too much. "The set of forks are all dirty" really is OK.

  • (cs) in reply to bambuti
    bambuti:
    real_aardvark:
    Strictly, it am a noun in the singular, and should never be accompanied by a verb in the plural. However, I note that the fine folk in Redmond ("In the beginning was Word" -- well, after just about everybody else, really) believe that "a couple" is always plural, and go all wavy and green if you attempt to make it singular. DaveK gets away with a bit of nit-picking here, I suppose.

    I believe that what you say wioll haven be entirely correct in American English, but in British English it's perfectly grammatical to use plural verbs with nouns that are semantically plural, even if they're syntactically singular. "England are beating France 14-9" and "Microsoft are all retards" are both fine over here.

    I wonder how Microsoft would parse "a set?" Does the conjugation depend upon the quantity of objects contained in the set?

    I admit that even in Britain, you have to strain a bit to come up with a plausible use of "this set are". But not too much. "The set of forks are all dirty" really is OK.

    Lynn Truss would kill you.

    "England," "Microsoft," and the like are not "semantically plural." Semantically, they're abstractions, and singular abstractions to boot. Extrapolating plurality from the fact that you know there are fifteen people in a rugby union team is not semantics, it's meta-language. I know he was using flags, not words, but Nelson didn't say that "England expect," now, did he?

    I'm English, and although it's a frequent usage, it's not correct. As I mentioned above, "demotic" grammar differs from "received" grammar; basically because it's verbalised, and there's a phenomenon of verbal drag that leads to associating the wrong noun with a verb or sub-clause. Few people actually write anything any more (emails and blogs being a wholly different medium), so I suspect that in a few short years this faux-pluralisation will become the norm. Unfortunate, but there you go.

    The examples you quote are all particularlised, and mostly relevant to spoken English. If you don't feel comfortable with the singular, why not "The English players are ..." or "Microsoft employees are ...?" Usually, as in the latter case, this formulation also has the benefit of not anthopomorphising an abstract noun.

    And "The set of forks are all dirty" really isn't OK. In fact, it even sounds horrible. "All the forks in this set are dirty" would be a better choice, both ways.

  • bambuti (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark

    [quote user="real_aardvark]Lynn Truss would kill you.[/quote]

    She's entertaining, but I think she could be subdued or knocked unconscious with a stream of split infinitives.

    [quote]"England," "Microsoft," and the like are not "semantically plural." Semantically, they're abstractions, and singular abstractions to boot. [/quote]

    I can't argue with your point on terminology, so I'll avoid attempting to use terms I'm not qualified to use. Suffice to say, then, that the nouns there are certainly denoting plural concepts in the mind of the speaker. Indeed that's the whole point of using the plural verbs with them. "England is winning" and "England are winning" carry subtly different meanings, one of which isn't as pithily expressible if you forbid that form.

    As for your saying it's just not correct, well, I guess we have to agree to differ there. I don't have a prescriptivist bone in my body... at least not for six days of the week. Secretly I still twitch when I see a grocer's apostrophe, but in general my criterion for acceptability is whether it's used by what are tweely called "careful users". I'm a "careful user", I see why a straightforward analysis would say this formation is ungrammatical, and I still consider it to be correct. I've never seen a (British) style guide complain about the form; rather, there seems to be plenty of evidence that it is regarded as an acceptable quirk of British usage. As for being uncomfortable with the singular, well I'd say it's more that I am comfortable with the plural as well as with the singular. I'd say "England is ahead" but "England are playing their socks off". The latter has nuances that I think you'd be churlish to lose by outlawing it.

    A quick search of "manchester united" on BBC News (not the last bastion of careful usage I admit, but still a reasonable starting point), shows a roughly even mix of plural and singular forms. "The club Man Utd has signed..." is interspersed with "Man Utd eye up..."

    I'd be interested to see evidence that its use was formerly less common.

    But with that, I'm bowing out. Grammar gripes (and flamewars) are a popular topic on WTF, but they sap the soul, and in the end the only winner is Ms Truss.

  • (cs) in reply to bambuti
    bambuti:
    I'd say "England is ahead" but "England are playing their socks off". The latter has nuances that I think you'd be churlish to lose by outlawing it.

    A quick search of "manchester united" on BBC News (not the last bastion of careful usage I admit, but still a reasonable starting point), shows a roughly even mix of plural and singular forms. "The club Man Utd has signed..." is interspersed with "Man Utd eye up..."

    I'd be interested to see evidence that its use was formerly less common.

    But with that, I'm bowing out. Grammar gripes (and flamewars) are a popular topic on WTF, but they sap the soul, and in the end the only winner is Ms Truss.

    I'm not overwhelmingly prescriptivist; I merely maintain that there is a distinction to be made between the written and the spoken language. And I agree with you here: the plural form sounds more fluent (or nuanced, or whatever).

    Since we're all going to end up talking and writing this way, however, can I make a plea for Ebonics?

    "England be beating the mofos 14-9" sounds far more appealing than "The English are 14-9 up," and it obviates any need to argue about singular/plural, or even to think about the issue... Of course, it'll still have a greengrocer's apostrophe in it eventually, but you can't win 'em all.

  • (cs) in reply to Jno
    Jno:
    Jaap-Jan:
    1337:
    ... Their our alot of common mistakes ...
    that was a joke write?
    Off course not.

    By the way, you spelt 'write' wrong, wright?

    By the way, you wrote wrong when you should have written wrongly.

    This could go on all day.

    I could have "wrote" wrong wrongly... wright? LOL!!!

  • Emphyrio (unregistered) in reply to An honest mouse

    You mean, "She wouldn't have had this problem if only she had been educated at Oxford." Education at Oxford is a finite process with a definite end, which occurred in the (subjunctive) past. You could also say "... if only she were an Oxford graduate.", since that implies a continuing state.

  • wtf (unregistered) in reply to Ancient_Hacker
    Ancient_Hacker:
    Oh Lord, this reminds me of when I was writing a User Manual.

    I had the sentence:

    To exit the program, type "Quit", then press the Enter key.

    The editor person sent it back as:

    To exit the program, type "Quit," then press the Enter key.

    I tried to persuade them that these were not quotation marks, but "literal marks", and putting the comma inside would be commanding the user to type Quit comma, which was incorrect.

    I never did manage to convince them of the right way to do this. So every instance of a command example in the manual was correct English, but wrong, in that it did not work.

    I almost changed the program to accept a trailing comma, but that would have been unpalatable (to me).

    Oh, I would have changed it, if I were you... I would have made it print "Sorry, my editor is an idiot. Try without the comma." whenever a command ended with a comma.

  • wtf (unregistered) in reply to Ancient_Hacker
    Ancient_Hacker:
    Oh Lord, this reminds me of when I was writing a User Manual.

    I had the sentence:

    To exit the program, type "Quit", then press the Enter key.

    The editor person sent it back as:

    To exit the program, type "Quit," then press the Enter key.

    I tried to persuade them that these were not quotation marks, but "literal marks", and putting the comma inside would be commanding the user to type Quit comma, which was incorrect.

    I never did manage to convince them of the right way to do this. So every instance of a command example in the manual was correct English, but wrong, in that it did not work.

    I almost changed the program to accept a trailing comma, but that would have been unpalatable (to me).

    Oh, I would have changed it, if I were you... I would have made it print "Sorry, my editor is an idiot. Try without the comma." whenever a command ended with a comma.

  • NIghtCactus (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT

    There is three errers in this sentence

    The 3rd errer is the one who wrote (typed) the sentence.

  • bambuti (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    "England be beating the mofos 14-9" sounds far more appealing than "The English are 14-9 up," and it obviates any need to argue about singular/plural, or even to think about the issue... Of course, it'll still have a greengrocer's apostrophe in it eventually, but you can't win 'em all.

    Deal! But only if it can be UK London-Subcontinental Ebonics. You know, phrases from Indian English pronounced with a hybrid Cockney/Afro-Caribbean accent, and ting. Innit. Admittedly, not being a Londoner, I only know it from seeing Catherine Tate, but I want to speak like that. Is it?

  • Synonymous Awkward (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Pedant
    Anonymous Pedant:
    You think that's bad, I've been doing most of my work recently in a semi-functional language that does invocation and composition by juxtaposition (e.g. "f(x)" is just "f x" and "g(f(x))" is just "g f x"). Now I keep trying to do things like "file which foo" in the shell.
    The obvious solution is just to write your own shell.

    Do I have to think of everything?

  • Cloak (unregistered) in reply to Spoe
    Spoe:
    Tim:
    It's not even a matter of being an alternative. It's the correct form in Britain, to say nothing of being far more logical - people do not say ",", therefore they should not be reported as such! Silly left-pondians...

    It is an alternative, no? You just happen to speak and write a dialect of English that uses the logical method of handling quotations as the default.

    At least we don't stick extra letters and syllables in to perfectly serviceable words like "color" and "aluminum". Just think of the wasted ink and paper! ;)

    Well, I think an "i" doesn't spoil a lot of ink but do you still spell aluminum as aluminium?

  • RK (unregistered)
    "Yeah, I know," replied Angie. "But I'm using it right — the comma is supposed to go inside the quotes!" Angie's strengths lie in English syntax.

    If you wanted to be REALLY gramatically correct it would be

    "But I'm using it correctly..."

    No problem ending her quote with the comma though!

  • SuperCritic (unregistered) in reply to Critic

    True, but I think we'd all agree that non-computer-scientists are generally inferior.

  • (cs) in reply to Emphyrio
    Emphyrio:
    You mean, "She wouldn't *have had* this problem if only she *had been* educated at Oxford." Education at Oxford is a finite process with a definite end, which occurred in the (subjunctive) past. You could also say "... if only she were an Oxford graduate.", since that implies a continuing state.
    Y'all are all dumbasses. It should say, "She wouldn't of had this problem if..." etc.

    Or possibly, "woodn't of", if originating from the Loozeana-to-Jawja section of The South.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to RadiantMatrix
    RadiantMatrix:
    Oh, this makes me happy:
    Their our alot of common mistakes that people make to often that could of easily been avoided.

    Very well done, sir.

    I had to read it alout to discern what word was replaced by "our".

  • Nas (unregistered)

    In North America we "tuck" punctuation inside quotation marks, true (see Chicago Manual of Style), but in the UK they put punctuation outside the quotation marks, so presumably people using C++ across the pond don't have this problem.

  • (cs) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    Emphyrio:
    You mean, "She wouldn't *have had* this problem if only she *had been* educated at Oxford." Education at Oxford is a finite process with a definite end, which occurred in the (subjunctive) past. You could also say "... if only she were an Oxford graduate.", since that implies a continuing state.
    Y'all are all dumbasses. It should say, "She wouldn't of had this problem if..." etc.

    Or possibly, "woodn't of", if originating from the Loozeana-to-Jawja section of The South.

    ... which is the most inapposite use of the word "Deep" that I have ever encountered.

    For six months.

    Eeeewww.

    Addendum (2007-10-19 19:27): Oops, sorry. "I lived there (Atlanta) for six months..."

    And Norleans is a superb place to visit. Wouldn't want to live there, either.

  • (cs) in reply to Nas
    Nas:
    In North America we "tuck" punctuation inside quotation marks, true (see Chicago Manual of Style), but in the UK they put punctuation *outside* the quotation marks, so presumably people using C++ across the pond don't have this problem.
    "Punctuation?" No, we don't.

    Where do you guys read this crap? Wikipedia?

    And just to kick off yet another flame war, since when was Chicago an arbiter of style? An arbiter of large-scale, unsophisticated, macro-economic damage, possibly, but style? PS. I like Chicago. I'm just depressed at the things that people attach to it (like the White Sox, for example.)

  • me (unregistered) in reply to Spoe

    I can't think of a good argument for colour, but the British pronunciation of aluminium is more logical, given that the name comes from Alum [a mineral]+ in [its in alum]+ ium [to identify it as an element], so the name means "an element found in alum".

    If only Webster had been able to spell, a lot of hassle could have been saved.

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